Samsung’s Galaxy S5 is innovative and exciting, but the latest technology is
about more than mobile phones, says Matt Warman

Thousands of people flocked to Barcelona for the launch of Samsung’s Galaxy S5 – it’s a globally important event that will shape the digital lives of at least 50 million users, and will also provide a halo for many millions more sales of Samsung products and smartphones worldwide.

The phone is water resistant, dust proof, a finger print lets you pay for shopping online, its camera lets you focus after you’ve taken a picture, and it will provide extraordinarily fast network speeds by combining WiFi and 4G into a single stream. All this is a genuinely innovative package, the result of billions invested in research and development.

And yet it’s not actually that exciting. As a phone the S5 is amazing – but it’s only slightly more amazing than the iPhone, the Sony Xperia Z2, the latest from LG and for that matter its own predecessor.

It would be easy to say Sony phones have been waterproof for ages – especially in Japan – that the Lytro camera had post-focus years ago, that most networks are slow at source not because of a phone - and that anyone who pays using only a fingerprint is a loon. Many people believe all those things are true - but to think it matters is to misunderstand where technology is heading.

So Samsung’s S5 is extraordinary not just because it’s a remarkable package, but also because it signposts a new era where smartphones – screens of any size for that matter – are simply the remote control for everything around us. For the first time a phone is part not just of a family of other phones and tablets but it’s genuinely integrated into a series of other screens on your watch, your fitness tracker and no doubt also your TV, your fridge and your washing machine.

That’s because every aspect of computing is now heading toward a connected world, where the internet can, if you want it, be present in every thing you own – an internet of things where you can turn the boiler on from work, where you can easily summon a driverless car and where there’s never any doubt about whether an object of almost any kind is working correctly.

Some will say that makes that remote control, the smartphone, a boring product. And it’s true that the smartphone no longer commands the thrill that the iPhone did in its first flush of youth. But what’s boring is to look at the most extraordinary gadgets mankind has yet conceived and not see the world they herald. Fair enough not to care about megapixels, gigahertz, gigabytes, the world’s first curved screens and the end of cash.

But the most exciting thing about technology today is not the gadget – the phone, the TV, the wifi washing machine or the connected toothbrush – it’s how much, collectively, they have changed the world in recent years, and how soon they will have a much greater impact for an ever-widening number of people across the world.